As one of Chicago’s worst winter storms raged outside, these babies decided they’d swap the calm of a mother’s womb for winter’s havoc.

Around 2 a.m. Wednesday, Andy Johnson attempted to dig out his car from 16- to 18-inch snowdrifts. His wife, Julia, was inside their Logan Square home, nine months pregnant and in severe pain. His brother, a Chicago firefighter, told him to call 911.

About 10 minutes later, a fire engine and ambulance arrived, but they couldn’t pull up to the building.

“She had to walk down the street about a block in the blizzard, and she had a contraction about halfway and had to stop,” said Andy Johnson, 30.

Still unsure if she was actually going into labor, the first-time mother focused on getting to the hospital.

“I still didn’t realize it,” she said from her hospital room Wednesday. “I was just thinking there’s something wrong. If this is prelabor, then I don’t understand how I’m going to give birth.”

When they arrived at Swedish Covenant Hospital, she was nine centimeters dilated and too far along for an epidural. Forty minutes later, she gave birth to 7-pound, 12-ounce Vada Johnson.

“She’s perfect,” Andy said.

Miles away at Provena Mercy Medical Center in Aurora, Stewart and Katherine Ruch thought they had made all the necessary arrangements for a blizzard delivery. Katherine, who was eight days overdue, was scheduled to induce labor early Tuesday.

“We didn’t want her to be caught in active labor in the middle of the storm,” Stewart said.

But the labor progressed slowly, and the contractions weren’t in full swing until about 2 a.m. Wednesday, which is when Katherine experienced complications.

“It became clear we had to do something,” Stewart, 44, said.

There was a surgeon who had spent the night at the hospital — the storm caused hundreds of doctors and nurses to camp out at area hospitals – but he was already performing another emergency c-section.

The other on-call doctor was trapped at home and couldn’t venture out in the storm at 3 a.m. The hospital sent the security crew in a 4-wheel-drive leased before the storm for exactly such emergencies. They picked up the doctor, who arrived in time to perform the c-section.

“It was a little scary, a little touch and go,” said Stewart, who added he watched the heavy snow fall from the windows in his wife’s birthing room.

At 10 pounds, 4 ounces, Becket John Ruch was born with a head of red hair at 4:29 a.m. He is the couple’s sixth child and weighed the largest at birth.

“I’m just really thankful,” Katherine said. “In the midst of the storm, we received a new life.”

Tony and Kim Carlsen feared they wouldn’t make it to Arlington Height’s Northwest Community Hospital in time.

When he couldn’t get his car out, he called a friend who picked the Mundelein couple up in his snowplow. But when Kim started screaming, Tony knew he needed to call 911. They transferred out of the snow plow and into the ambulance at a Shell gas station.

“I felt so much better because they had people in the back with her if she went into labor, as opposed to me and my guy and a snowplow in the middle of the storm,” he said.

In Wheaton, when Mandie Conforti’s husband couldn’t get the car out for a scheduled c-section early Wednesday, they weren’t too worried. Her sister, who lives down the street, picked them up in her Denali.

But when they got to the hospital, the doctor called Conforti in amazement.

“She said, ‘How did you guys get to the hospital?’” Conforti said.

So she had her sister, who is friends with the doctor, drive out and pick up the doctor.

“Thank God she didn’t have to go pick up the anesthesiologist,” Conforti laughed.